Review – The Goode Family

The Goode Family – ABC – 8:30/7:30pm Friday – USA

Well here’s something different a Mike Judge animated program that doesn’t completely suck. Mike Judge has always been an enigma for me – I love Office Space, and thought Idiocracy was hilarious but I don’t get King Of The Hill and I think Beavis & Butthead Do America is one of the worst films ever made.

I figured The Goode Family is an animation so it’ll slot right in alongside those other two on the ‘bad’ side of things, but here it is straddling the fence neither here nor there.

The Goode Family are a family of folks who always strive to be politically correct. There’s a dad, who I swear I thought was the younger brother for like half the episode, there’s the mum who isn’t sure if African Americans are still called African Americans anymore or are they now ‘Americans Of Color’, there’s the daughter and of course their adopted African son Ubuntu – who’s white – because he was adopted from South Africa.

If anything in there made you go ‘heh’ then yeah, that’s the entire show. It’s ‘half funny’ in the way King Of The Hill usually is, which means to say there’s a story and it isn’t throw away gag after throw away gag like say Family Guy.

When the characters are all set up to be these greeny liberal types always striving to ‘do the right thing’ you get the feeling that they’re just going to be a walking punching bag but Mike Judge steers away from that angle; which was refreshing. It does suffer from King Of The Hill esq voice acting, you know kind of laid back and boring. I’m going to tune in for a second episode but it’s not like I’m leaping out of my seat to get to it.

In the animated comedy department it’s miles better than Sit Down, Shut Up but then that’s not saying much. I don’t think that it matters that it’s on ABC rather than at the home of animation on FOX because I’m pretty sure this thing would be getting cancelled either way. It doesn’t have the instant gratification dumbed down lowest common denominator rapid fire jokes of Family Guy or American Dad, and it doesn’t have the ‘impress the geeks’ factor of Futruma, and it certainly doesn’t have the ‘this has been on forever we’ll never cancel it’ factor of The Simpsons – I’m not sure where a show like this could find a home, but then again I can’t explain how King Of The Hill got eleven seasons other than for the fact that Mike Judge must have compromising photos of Rupert Murdoch lying around.

Good, Alright, Bad or Ugly?
Alright